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Monday, 17 March 2008

Manipal, India — Just as any CEO would,
George W. Bush and his CFO Dick Cheney have focused on ensuring as high a
monetary return as possible to those who invested in their campaigns. Whether
it is the oil companies based out of Houston, Texas, or corporations like
Halliburton, those who put their dollars behind the Bush-Cheney ticket have
been rewarded beyond their most optimistic calculations.

The downside has been a recession caused by
the financial cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined with the higher
oil prices generated by the geopolitical experiments of the current U.S.
administration and the get-rich-anyhow outlook of financial institutions. Had
the U.S. economy not been faced with these multiple shocks, stock and housing
prices would most likely have continued to rise, thereby bailing out those
institutions that advanced funds to subprime borrowers.

However, while individual corporations have
benefitted exponentially from 2001 to 2008, the bulk of U.S. consumers have had
to be content with modest or negative gains, thereby leading to the present
loss of confidence in the future of what will, for another generation at least,
be the primary economic engine of the globe.

After witnessing the colonial-style
scramble for profits from the oil sector in Iraq -- which in its transparent
rapacity most resembles Belgian policy in the Congo during much of the past
century -- as well as the manner in which some corporate and other entities
have leveraged their political connections to secure monopolies in Iraq and
Afghanistan, savers in East and South Asia as well as Russia have steadily lost
confidence in the integrity of the U.S. dollar and shifted to the euro. This
has contributed to a slide in the greenback's value that may wipe away any
gains in the anemic anti-inflation measures taken by the U.S. Federal Reserve
thus far, and exacerbate the decline in both business as well as consumer
confidence.

Monday, 10 March 2008

Manipal, India — Malaysia's Prime Minister
Abdullah Badawi made the worst call of his political career by calling a
general election a full year before it was due, believing that international
economic uncertainty was likely to send the economy southwards and ethnic
tensions were at risk of escaping from the band-aid applied to them.

He therefore decided on a March 2008 poll,
but Saturday's loss of 60 of the 199 parliamentary seats that his Barisan
Nasional Party had won in 2004 has weakened not only his government but his
leadership over a party unhappy with his "bureaucratic" style.

Sadly, the mild-mannered, moderate Badawi
is less the culprit than he is the victim of the Malay supremacist policies
followed by his party since 1957. These policies have implied that the
multiracial, multifaith country's Malay majority of 60 percent was an
endangered species in need of protection against the rest of the population,
including the one-tenth that are ethnic Indians and one-fifth of Chinese descent.

The "bumiputra" policies followed
by Malaysia's rulers since the 1950s have been sharpened over the decades, so
that in effect today non-Muslims and non-Malays have a second-class status in
the country. As occurred in the Indian mutiny of 1857, it was a question of
faith that ignited the Hindu firestorm on Nov. 25, 2007, that led to the
present electoral debacle for Badawi -- after Hindu temples were bulldozed to
make way for roads, malls and housing sites.

Such contempt for the institutions of their
faith sparked anger among the Hindus of Malaysia. Although Muslims of Indian
origin kept away from the protests that followed, the 90 percent of the
Malaysian Indian community that are Hindu was alienated from the ruling party
by the brutal police repression let loose against peaceful protestors in scenes
reminiscent of the days of the freedom struggle in India. Several of the
protestors were jailed, and many are still in prison on the absurd charge of
terrorism.

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About Prof. M. D. Nalapat

Prof. Madhav Das Nalapat (aka MD Nalapat or Monu Nalapat), holds the UNESCO Peace Chair and is Director of the Department of Geopolitics at Manipal Academy of Higher Education, India. The former Coordinating Editor of the Times of India, he writes extensively on security, policy and international affairs. Prof. Nalapat has no formal role in government, although he is said to influence policy at the highest levels. @MD_Nalapat

MD Nalapat's anthology 'Indutva' (1999)

In 1999, Har-Anand published Indutva an anthology of MD Nalapat's 1990s columns from the Times of India. The individual columns are posted here, in 1998 and 1999 of the blog archive, though the exact dates of publication are uncertain.